Christoph
Brunen

I must have been about 3 years old when we got there. Too early to have any vivid memories. From the movies and from what our parents told us about Yemen, there are only two sequences, real or imagined I am not sure:
The first, when I was about 3 ½, the accident that almost took my life. I tore myself loose from our gardener’s/driver’s? hand and ran across the street in front of the house – only to get run over by a motorcycle. Talk about crappy timing! I ended up in a Yemeni hospital with a skull fracture. My memory is of an operating table and a naked lightbulb from which a cat had just been told to scat. My Mom told me later they were going to patch me up with a thick and a (slightly) thinner measure of wire when someone informed her that a new hospital had been recently opened. That hospital, a gift to the Yemeni by the Kuwaitis, was stocked with socialist doctors and nurses from Hungary – socialist Brothers in Arms back then. So off we went and a Dr. Kosma patched me up. Still my favourite scar today and adorns most of my left temple. Does anyone remember Mel Gibson and Rene Russo in ‘Lethal Weapon’ when they compare scars? Remove the erotic component and I win! I actually met with Dr. Kosma some 35 years later after the Iron curtain was no more. I thanked him with a bottle of Blue Label and a loving embrace.
The second memory is of the revolution that took place during our time there. Royalist troops supported by the Egyptian government pitted against the socialist regime. You can do the research yourself, if you are so inclined. One night the windows were blasted across the bedroom where my brother Alex and I slept. This was the result of tank shells raining down in the street. I recall glass flying everywhere and my terrified mother coming in to shuttle us to the basement. The next thing I remember is that we were witness to an awesomely red sunrise after the shelling had stopped.

I still have a few “oldies” on fb from my Korea days (45+ years ago). Kim McCarthy and Jae Jung Rhee (both hot, hot, hot!) Others, like Thomas and Jimmy Elkins are Trump fans …what can I say. They are entitled to an opinion and I am not going to discuss politics! As we had no German schools catering to the German-language community, I attended International Schools. Those were the roots of my flawless American accent! However, our parents forced us to attend the Goethe Institut for German language lessons every Saturday. What a bummer! Not only did we not enjoy more studies, we also missed out on KC Kasem’s American Top 40 on the radio. Sundays were mostly spent hiking in the mountains around Seoul.

Kuala Lumpur is the place I remember most fondly. Almost all my dearest friends-for-life are actually from the formative high school years in Malaysia. Due to our parents’ jobs that took them overseas as Expats, we came from all walks of life. In my Senior year I recall the school had enrolled 52 nationalities at a time when we broke the 600 student’s barrier – grades 1 to 12!
Unequivocally, we have in common to us all only ONE thing – the International School of Kuala Lumpur. What a fabulous institution of learning that was. In retrospect … although I was only a “solid” C- student (my A’s in PE saved my GPA), I even liked my teachers! Coach Daniels wins my favourite teacher award hands down. Great man and forever my hero. Again, retro-actively, Mrs. Mahendran and Mrs. McElroy also warm my heart. The former for being tough because she knew (rather, suspected), I had more brains than my lazy ass wanted to use! The latter for passing me in Geometry with an outstanding D- so I could graduate. Turns out she was a soccer fan and I was the top scorer. Yes, I was a jock … but apparently with a winning streak – whichever way we look at it! With 20/20 hindsight 😉, I actually regret not doing another year at ISKL. I could have made many more fond memories!
To this day, we ISKLites meet up somewhere in the world, multiple locations, all year round. I have had my fair share of reunions in San Antonio, Houston and, most memorably, in KL for ISKLs 50th Anniversary. We don’t really do class reunions. Anybody who attended ISKL, regardless of year, is Family and therefore welcome. I love them all. We are all somehow linked up on fb with various groups that take the KL experience all the way back to the ‘50s. A truly outstanding crowd of individuals … UNSURPASSED!

From Texas I remember only the old high school friends who attended various universities there. We were either roommates or they attended university not far away. At one time there were at least 8 people from ISKL attending SHSU. As a TCK you followed your American friends to wherever they were going. How was I to know that SHSU was a dump? Where the hell is Huntsville, TX anyway? Most people know Huntsville only because they had 7 (yes 7!) prisons in and around town. Two of them maximum security with (more-or-less) regular death sentence events. Then again, we were there when MTV was born! Madonna was a virgin, Martha Quinn of MTV fame lost hers a buncha times, the Jolly Fox gave us Ladie’s Night, Dime Night and a bunch of pool tables where we could while away the evenings.
On a positive note, I dropped sports in favor of studies. I took loads of courses and graduated with a GPA of 3.4. Not bad for a lazy bastard…and Golden Key National Honor Society to boot!
From my UGA days I remember only a German guy by the name of Kersten von Seebach. Considering he was a “von” with blue blood, he was the total fuckup … in the best sense of the word. We stuck together like flies on shit for 2 years. I got him to focus on studies, he got me to focus on party! We both got our M.A. in Political Science. I graduated with a GPA of 3.8 and wrote a pretty damn good thesis on Sovie and American arms transfers to the Third World, some pretty original stuff and very intellectually satisfying.

During the latter days of my graduate studies I needed to make some serious choices. Stay and get a PhD? Stay and get another MA in journalism? Go home and find my roots? I chose the latter. After having lived abroad 23 out of my 25 years I decided to head back to Bonn, Germany to start a new life. I remember it well. I arrived back in Germany speaking almost no German, a terrible vocabulary and, to top it off, with a broad American accent. It took people some getting used to!